One Knit at a Time

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At Unmade, a completed sweater .CreditCreditAndrew Testa for The New York Times

By Ming Liu

March 30, 2016

LONDON — The offices of Unmade have the typical trappings of a digital start-up: exposed ceilings, small potted plants, whiteboards flecked with colored Post-it notes. But there also are three industrial knitting machines, their humming mechanics churning out customized sweaters and scarves.

Unmade is out to change the fashion industry, one knit at a time. The company, which introduced its first collection in November, is a three-year labor of love for a young entrepreneurial trio who have merged cutting-edge software with the traditional knitwear process to allow buyers to order individualized pieces.

Underlying the concept are partnerships with creative designers, each contributing pieces to form a kind of style gallery for customers, said Ben Alun-Jones, 28, the company’s creative director and co-founder. (The other founders are Hal Watts, 30, Unmade’s chief executive, and Kirsty Emery, 29, the fashion director.)

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The team at Unmade: Ben Alun-Jones, Kirsty Emery and Hal Watts.CreditAndrew Testa for The New York Times

Customers select styles on the Unmade website and then, as the company describes it, “unmake” them as they wish — twisting, moving, altering, even “splatting” a motif, like the designer Paris Essex’s paint-daubed-looking creation.

“We think the position of the designer is super important,” Mr. Alun-Jones said. “But we are using technology to give people a voice.”

Of the company’s 16 collaborators, many are illustrators, architects, graphic designers and digital artists. They are not part of the fashion world. Moniker, for example, is an interactive design studio based in Amsterdam that often seeks public input for its projects; for Unmade, customers can “break up” its traditional, monochrome houndstooth pattern. The retro stenciling looks by the graphic illustrator Edward Carvalho Monaghan are fresh and bold when transplanted onto knitwear.

There also are collaborators who are well known in the fashion world, like Christopher Raeburn, who won the British Fashion Awards’ emerging designer prize in 2011. Customers are invited to select a location to add to his sweater design, inspired by a Borneo map.

Once a design is personalized, customers can choose either merino wool or cashmere, in 10 customized shades. The final order is sent to Unmade’s studio at Somerset House in London for printing, hand assembly and finishing. Delivery time is around five days.

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The Unmade workroom.CreditAndrew Testa for The New York Times

More than 1,000 orders have been placed since the company’s initial collection was introduced. Prices range from around 60 pounds, or $85, for a merino scarf to £220 for a cashmere sweater.

The hope is that users will “keep and treasure” the sweaters and scarves, Mr. Alun-Jones said, but also that the company will help reduce overproduction, one of the fashion industry’s biggest sources of waste. “Ten to 25 percent of all clothes ever made go straight to landfills,” he said. “They are never even sold.”

The company’s green credentials were recently recognized by Selfridges, the British department store, which in early January set up an Unmade pop-up store at its Oxford Street flagship location in London, complete with a knitting machine donated by the manufacturer Stoll GB.

Such machines are standard in the fashion industry, found in factories around the world, and Unmade’s software is designed to work with them. So the company hopes its products eventually will be produced close to where its buyers live, from Singapore to Stockholm, and that the materials can be sourced locally, too.

The benefits, Mr. Alun-Jones said, can extend beyond the ecological. “In the future we could partner with a French lace specialist or companies that are very historic,” he said. “We wouldn't want to try and develop that ourselves.”

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A worker measuring a finished piece.CreditAndrew Testa for The New York Times

Mr. Watts, Unmade’s chief executive, said the company really “is about bringing down the barriers of access to production.”

He noted that the current uncertainty in the fashion world over when collections should be shown and sold — including Burberry’s recent announcement that it would begin selling entire collections straight from the catwalk — may put more pressure on independent designers and open opportunities for an outfit like Unmade.

For the moment, it’s the boundary-pushing creative types who seem most drawn to Unmade.

In December, the company joined with It’s Nice That, a creative agency based in London, for its first guest collection, featuring three designers. Jamie McIntyre, the lead art director at It’s Nice That, has called Unmade the “factory of the future.”

“We always seek collaborators that challenge their own disciplines,” Mr. McIntyre said in an email, adding that Unmade was a “natural fit” with his agency. “Out with the slow, sluggish factory floor, in with the coders and developers,” he said.